Mike Stackpole - Ghost Book One - The Earth Transformed

She turned to the bartender. “Keep makin’ this stuff for as long as people keep having the symptoms, and give them a drink a day.”

He nodded, then turned to the crowd. “Got it. Blue drinks on the house for as long as it takes!”

The crowd cheered and started knocking back their blue booze, then heading out to round up their friends and family.

Metal wiped his mouth as he finished his, then turned to Kate. “Any long term effects from this poisoning that we should know about?”

Kate frowned, uncomfortable. “Uh, you should, uh, probably think twice about having children.”

Mad Dog barked at that. “What? Why?”

“Well,” said Kate. “The radiation has, uh, probably mutated some of your DNA. That shouldn’t be a problem for you , but any children you have after this, particularly with a woman who has also been irradiated, might be—”

Angie’s walkie squawked, interrupting her. “Angie, it’s Vargas! Got us some nasties up here. Need some back–up. Get up here ASA—” Gunfire through the radio drowned him out for a second, then he was back. “ASAP I said. Copy?”

Angie snatched the walkie off her belt. “Copy, Snake. On our way!”

She hopped off her stool and beckoned to me and Ace. “Come on. Let’s vamoose.”

We ran after her as she bolted out of the bar. And even though she hadn’t been asked, Kate came too.

We followed the echoes of gunfire down into the earth.

The facility didn’t look like anything from the outside, just a featureless gray brick block house, hardly bigger than a garage. That was just a stairhead, though, and we charged down six flights before we got to the first level. The gunfire was louder as soon as we kicked open the door. It rang in our ears as we paced through a maze of featureless white hallways. The sound was so fractured that I stopped being able to tell which direction it was coming from, and would have got totally lost except that our fellow rangers weren’t stupid. One of them, Vargas, Hell Razor, Thrasher — hell, maybe it was Athalia — had jammed open every door they’d gone through, so once we found their trail it was easy to follow.

The facility reminded me of Sleeper Base One in terms of construction, all blank walls, stainless steel, and frosted glass doors, chrome trim and softly glowing lights that illuminated the baseboards whenever we got within a dozen feet. It didn’t feel real. It wasn’t part of the decaying world six flights above us, and not just because it was separated by technology and style. It literally felt like we’d gone back through time to the golden age before the bombs — back when everything was clean and new.

We moved through those glowing halls in good order. Angie, Ace and me trading point and cover at the corners like a seasoned squad and Kate following a cautious distance behind. Ace’s movements were so professional that it reminded me of how neatly he’d dealt with the goons at the Black Market, and that made me wonder about his background.

“Angie said you were a mechanic,” I said as we covered her advance. “Handle yourself pretty well for a grease monkey.”

“I used to work for Faran Brygo.” He shrugged. “And mechanic sometimes has more than one meaning.”

“Ah,” I said. “As in you fix things.”

He nodded. “Whatever’s broke.”

We ran on, following the scent of cordite and the sounds of mayhem.

I’d never been in a more antiseptic place in my life. The walls and floors and ceilings weren’t just white, there wasn’t any dust on them at all. There weren’t any boot scuffs on the floor. There weren’t any thumb prints on the chrome. We pushed through a kitchen and it had been cleaned to the point where we couldn’t tell if anything in there had been used. Ever.

That was weird. Creepy. We knew people worked here. We’d just talked to a bunch of ’em. And people have to eat . And people eating means there will, at some point, be bacon. Civilization might have crumbled, but God wasn’t so cruel he would let knowledge of how to make bacon vanish. And bacon meant bacon grease, and unless your cleaners went about their task with a superhumanly tight focus and mindless devotion, there’d be a trace of it somewhere.

We saw nothing.

Angie whistled as we hurried past the stove tops and dish sink. “Back at Ranger Center, even the infirmary isn’t this clean.”

“It’s not the clean that unnerves me,” I said. “There’s no dust. That means the cleaning has been recent, but the staff has been gone for a while. Who did this cleaning?”

“Elves?” suggested Ace. “Pixies?”

We pushed into another hall and heard the chatter of an SMG coming from a stairwell in the far wall. The sound was raw and unmuffled. There were no more doors between us and the action. Whatever was happening was right at the bottom of those stairs.

“Come on,” I said, and pushed ahead, ready to charge down with guns blazing.

Angie caught me by my backpack and hauled me back.

“Not this time, ghost boy.” She stepped ahead of me and started down at a more measured pace. “You’ve already gone off half–cocked once today. This time you’re gonna follow my lead.”

“Sure, sure.”

I followed her down with Ace at my heels and Kate a flight back, and I gotta say, I was actually relieved. Now that I had a second to think about it, charging down into a firefight without taking a look–see first seemed like the stupidest idea in the world, but I’d been ready to jump in with both feet — just like back at the Black Market, just like at White Mesa. What the hell? What was going on with my brain?

At the bottom of the stairs a haze of gun smoke drifted through an open door and we could hear strange grinding noises and stranger voices coming from the room beyond. They were tinny, mechanical voices, like the kind of thing you’d occasionally hear on salvaged pre–war answering machines.

“Employees are not to interfere with custodial staff in the performance of their duties. Any employee who interferes with custodial staff in the performance of their duties will be removed from the premises.”

We crept down to the bottom and peeked through, Kate hovering behind us, half way down the last flight of steps. Right inside the door was a small room that looked like some kind of security checkpoint, barred doors on either end and a window on one side made out of inch–thick bulletproof glass. Both the security doors were jammed open, however, and we could see through them to a larger room that seemed to be filled with old–fashioned barred jail cells. There was also something moving in there, but the smoke was so thick we couldn’t tell what it was.

At least there was no gunfire anymore, just the strange grinding noise, the weird voice, and underneath both of those the soft sobbing of terrified people.

Angie ran back up to the first landing and grabbed her walkie. “Vargas. You still alive in there? Whatta we got?”

“Angie!” Vargas’s voice sounded rough and tired. “Good to hear you. We’re still alive. Holed up in an old guard room with robots out in the cell block, pinning us down. We can’t get out and they can’t get in. If you’re in the stairwell you’ll get the jump on ’em easy, but be careful. Got friendlies in the cells. We were breakin’ ’em out when the cleaning crew showed up.”

“Armed?”

“Oh yeah.” Vargas laughed through the radio. “Mops, brooms and machine guns. They’re ready to blast those dust bunnies back to the stone age.”

“Alright,” said Angie. “Hang tight.”

She came back down the stairs and pointed straight at me. “Okay, Kami–Crazy. You wanna go hog wild again, then listen up. Somebody’s gotta go in there and tell those friendlies to lay flat on the ground, if they aren’t already. Of course as soon as you start shouting, those pepper–pots on wheels are gonna come for you like a tin–can stampede.”